TYDR: Track Your Daily Routine

Abstract

This chapter introduces TYDR—Track Your Daily Routine, an Android app that enables the research of the relationship between smartphone sensor data and usage statistics and the users’ personality via mobile crowdsensing. TYDR processes and visualizes the tracked data as well as the results of the personality questionnaires. We released TYDR on Google Play in October 2018 and registered 3,921 installations since then. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a full-scale, integrated privacy model specifically for apps related to mobile collection of data. Our privacy model called PM-MoDaC (Privacy Model for Mobile Data Collection Apps) consists of nine concrete measures to be taken to ensure the users’ privacy. These measures include transparently informing the users about the data being collected, the anonymization of user data, and enabling an opt-out option. We present the implementation of all the privacy measures in TYDR. We collected data with TYDR over the course of a two-months period and extensively evaluated our privacy model and which data users are willing to share. Based on data about granting TYDR all or no Android system permissions, we found evidence that younger users tend to be less willing to share their data (average age of 30 years compared to 35 years). We also observed that female users tend to be less willing to share data compared to male users. We did not find any evidence that education or personality traits are a factor related to data sharing. TYDR users score higher on the personality trait openness to experience than the average of the population, which we assume to be evidence that the type of app influences the user base it attracts in terms of average personality traits.